What You Say!

How Did It Come To This?

Life Lesson #170: I know your body’s like a cloud, floating around the softer side of things you know. You’re in love with an Igor who’s in love with a placid penguin.

4 Days Left

I’m sipping hot cocoa in the balcony with the lights off with nothing but music on. No people, no thinking. Nothing. Just this. Just now. It feels good. I don’t wanna think. If I turn the music off I’ll start thinking about how this year has been and how I might like the next one to be. I don’t want that. I’ve got loads to work on tonight, I overslept and missed class, and woke up with slightly inebriated from yesterday’s headache. Not now, in a bit. Now’s nothing time.

4 days left.

Of Marshies And Ugg Boots.

It’s infuriating that it’s Christmas eve and there’s not goddamn concert or Christmas event anywhere, and the ones that are suck ass. Eskenderella? Seriously? Yeah, sure, there’s one on the 29th, but Christmas eve is not the 29th now, is it? Not only is there no event today, but I’m gonna have to miss the Nutcracker ballet suite on the 29th because mom and dad have appointments at work.

No, Today will NOT start off on the wrong leg, nothing beats a little Christmas shopping. The tree is a few ornaments short, and I gotta buy marshmallows and cocoa, because it’s just not right without hot cocoa and marshies. Maybe I’ll buy ugg boots and call it a day. Am I running a fever? What the hell am I saying? I actually started liking em. Do I get em red or black? Omg, someone shoot me now..

Come to think of it, I’ve never actually got boots. I was always too short for it to be a valid option. My dad keeps saying “hayeb2a nossek gazma”, and come to think of it, well, yes that’s true. Midgets and boots make posh gnomes tho.

Coldplay’s new album is nowhere to be seen. No word on its release yet, could it possibly be delayed? That can’t happen. A friend pointed out – much to my excessive and incessant nagging about the album – that I just might be prepping myself for disappointment. So I’ll just shut up about that and keep my fingers crossed..AND check on it first thing when the clock strikes 12. Yeh, that oughta do. W mesh hazaker neela 7aga enaharda! Exams or not!

Etymology. I Don’t Know, I Just Wanted to Say That.

December is proving itself to be the dust bunny that almost choked you when  you tried to hug it. It’s still my favourite month tho. It’s when Coldplay’s new album comes out and you can drink scalding hot cocoa all snuggled up in bed feeling like a hobo. Gotta love hobos.

I just realized that 80% of my blogging experience is after hours. Well, I was sleeping, like normal human beings when my inner nocturnal slipped out of its dormant state and poked at me, so I randomly woke up at 2 am saying ‘I want that red topcoat.’ Annoying bit is that I don’t even remember if I slept or not and I don’t have any dreams to prove it! Frick.

So anywho, I was thinking how stuff can work out in a way you don’t expect em to. For what it’s worth, I don’t really believe in that at all, which is why it’s odd enough for me to blog about it when I could be using my spare time doing other constructive stuff like studying chemistry.. HAHAHAHA, okay no not really. I could be picking on em unsuspecting dweebs lingering around FB  chat – which is, for the record, one scary place – or watching the water boil in the water heater as I make my sacred coffee portion of the day, or have pickled lemons. At all. I’ve always thought it’s man’s way of rationalizing stuff out of their area of control to try and pull it back in there; because if you can make sense of bad stuff in a way that pleases you, then they’re to your advantage and you’re back behind the steering wheel; which is just another subtle way of being a control freak. Back to the point. No harm in some guilty pleasure, eh?

 

 

1. I’ve just realized that not knowing my way around twitter could and ultimately would improve my goldfish memory, since I can't figure out which replies link back to what and how to get there let alone reply. I mean, what the hell, if replying to someone’s post shows up on your wall, how the fuck is the other person supposed to see it unless they’d been coincidentally stalking you ? Or is the Twitter R&D team that bourgeoisie that it doesn’t quiiiiiiiiite acknowledge communicating with ‘followers’?

2. Temporarily losing the use of your palate over blisteringly hot and cheesy margarita pizza makes your taste bud memory, if there exists any, stuck on loop to the day you went  out for pizza with friends for a week. It also you makes your creativity go wild with drinks/soups/anything that is ingested through sipping, because believe it or not, your palate has a huge role in biting stuff. Not to mention that it also leads to the life-changing realization that everything tastes better with Mayo.

3. Running out of Coffee makes you go for tea, and you know, it’s not that bad after all. It’s like this nice fellow you go for when your badass mate is outta town. And yes, I capitalised the C in Coffee and not the T in tea. I’m loyal, sue me.

4. Bad Haircuts. Nothing feels better than having a photo of someone you really wanna punch in the face with a bad haircut. Ah, the sheer soothing potential of it. It’s like a metaphorical ego massage man. And having one of you could make someone you really pissed off feel better, and that someone might just have been Jack The Ripper in another life. Who knows..

5. Not being able to think of one more thing could make you a little more accepting of even numbers. Or you could turn it around like I just did. Can’t risk the jinx.

I Am A Mirror A Mirror Am I

So I ditched the Paulo Coelho’s drone of a book and am back to my love-hate relationship with Gregory Maguire. If I ever had to name one book that I didn't stand yet couldn’t stop reading, it would inevitably be “Wicked”. My first impression of the book was that that author did not have enough creative material that he had to make it an art out of extracting the magic from every last fold of the beautiful Oz, chiselling an artwork out of its hard precipitate by taking another artist’s work of art and giving it dimensions of his own. However, curiosity made me wonder how far he took it, and that’s probably what the writer depended on to give the book sales a controversial thrust, L. Frank Baum’s celebrity and the sensation “The Wizard of Oz” caused at its time. I couldn’t help noticing three things about how the book is written.

Firstly, the dimensions he set to the book, the moral, political and fictitious dimensions were not very intact. At one point, two dimensions would merge and leave out the third, and then the third would get brought up, and you could get a sense of caricaturised politics in the book. He’s misleading at that too. Gregory Maguire characterized the essence of Nazism, the ongoing controversies among beliefs, discrimination against colour and sex in a way that it is just obvious enough not to be taken too seriously, but get you just where he wants you to be for whatever plot twist he has in mind.

Secondly, he didn’t use what most writers do with protagonists. Authors tend to make you like or hate the main character, according to the plot in question, to gain the reader’s emotional stamp of approval that comes when you get to actually pin em as the “good guy” or the “bad guy” and hence overcome the moral “Spelling check”. Nevertheless, with that little side door, all he did was make you relate to Elphaba, on a more instinctively logical level. Still, I think he used the fact that she strived to defend animal rights to justify her own humanity without meaning to, and to highlight her sense of retaliating to the injustice with which she’d been treated throughout her life by the ferocity of her defence of those defenceless creatures.

Thirdly, a certain air of morbid injustice was held unwaveringly throughout the book, in a sense like the old saying: “The end justifies the means”. He pushed boundaries with his attempt to re-define good and evil. As a consequence, instead of trying to set the constant villain-hero scale, he kept the characters, especially Elphaba’s, rather volatile. Despite the fact that the book sales were elbowed into celebrity, I’d say it was its mystic cleverness that kept it going. Almost a year later and I’m nostalgic for another one of his maimed fairytales. I’m on ‘Mirror Mirror’, his alteration of Snow White And The Seven Dwarves. At the very beginning of the book, there’s a long poem, with no two lines adding up at all. I had my theories that they’re not the same person talking, even tho every line begins with I, as a sort of dream-like cloud of tags. Then throughout the book, a line of that poem starts another mini one, where, as it seems to me, he depicts every character in the book. I’m not that far into it, and I’ve always been bad with poems to be frank, but the one epitomising the dwarf grew on me, or that’s how I got it at least. The author has rather a perverse nature tho, interestingly perverse. He can sell anything to you if you’re open enough, and there’s hardly anything he hasn’t picked at more or less.

‘I’m a rock whose hands have appetites.

I’m a rock whose appetites have hands.

I’m a thing unresolved into courteous shapeliness.

I’m a creature excluded from limbo and hell,

A thing of which heaven prefers to stay well unaware.

Neither pet, nor beast of the fields, or beast of the woods,

Nor idiot kept, more or less, in the warmth of the hearth,

For the sometime amusement of humans and sarcastic angels.

Nothing exists but it rests on my, at the start,

At the end; but I keep to myself, as no one will have me.’

Making Your Way Back Home Thinking Oh No.

Of A Constant That Will Turn.

Life Lesson #161: ‘No eleventh hour reprieve. Keep your head above water, but don’t forget to breathe.’

Life Lesson #162: Ultimatums work if you’re a suicide bomber. Otherwise you’re just a little bugger flailing your arms in the middle of some department store that everybody’s gonna forget about over their TV dinner 7 minutes later. They even get to call themselves heroes because of it. They will, however, continue munching ‘heroically’ as you rot in a cell that smells like pickles.

Life Lesson #163: Muffins are bold cupcakes. It takes dough to go out without all that icing.

Life Lesson #164: No matter how many lessons you studiously pile up, you’ve still got a lot to learn kiddo, haven’t you?

Life Lesson #165: Take One: When all else fails; you’ve probably been trying too hard for anything to work.

Life Lesson #166: Take Two: When all else fails, you probably just need to tell it like it is.

Life Lesson #167: Take Three: Or you could just have a pickle. Pickles are nice.

Life Lesson #168: This goes out to Cee Lo Green: How could there be footprints on the ceiling again?

Life Lesson #169: It’s so cold I can feel the tip of my nose freezing, but then again I could never have felt the tip of my nose any other way.

But Time..Is On Your Side..It’s On Your Siiiiiiiiiiiide Nahoooow.

Do you know when you get so frustrated doing something that you start thinking about parallel abstract equivalents to pat the ego bump? I’ve been working on the same Maths sheet all day, and I’m not done yet. I’ve even missed Arabic class because I’d rather do Maths and because, well, who the fuck cares about Arabic class? It’s almost irrelevant. The dude just stands there and reads what we already have in the binders. We can read too, you know. Anywho, so I got frustrated with logarithms and started thinking that maybe the only reason I like Maths is because it’s one of the few things I haven’t already conquered, as egotistical as that sounds at the back of my head. There’s always a little more to know about it and you could never quite get the hang of it, it’s almost humbling how it accentuates your insignificance with just another couple of signs. Then I started thinking, maybe all I actually like about Maths is the challenge, like everything, and come to think of it, everyone, in my life. You know when you’re after something just because you just can’t get your arms around the fact that you might not be able to do it, and drop it as soon as you unlock whatever riddle it offers? In simpler words, maybe I’m the bedazzled dude and Maths is the hard-to-get chick.

And by God I’m getting that chick no matter what. I don’t care how long it takes. I’m a spoiled little stubborn brat who’s used to getting her way. Bring it on, Maths sheet. You think you’re so hot? Drop-dead gorgeous much? Mesh 3lya ya mama.

Ok I might have got a wee bit too emotional there.

*Looks to Maths sheet* I’m onto you.

December has been quite..what’s the word for it. Tempestuous? Nah. Maybe just a little too Beethoven-y for my taste; going all smooth then bursting out in symphonic epic harmonies that almost seem like they’re meant for you to go deaf in some karmic settling of scores. 2010 seems to have ‘catching up on some soul-reaping’ on its to-do list. Trying to go out with a bang, eh?

It’s still slow tho. It still has the ‘I-won’t-rush-if-my-life-depended-on-it’ feel, which after all metaphorically makes sense in a way. It is the last month of the year, innit?

2011 is an odd number. I like odd numbers. 2009 was an odd number tho. I hate odd numbers. 2010’s been even, a compromise, a package of pulsating aftermaths. I detest even numbers.

And cookies are awesome.

My Grandma Eloped?

So we couldn’t find my grandma this morning. Yeh. Apparently she wandered off into the sandstorm, and since she doesn’t believe in the use of cell phones as a tracking device, we kept calling up everybody directly related and indirectly attached to locate her. As a chilling exercise, I passed the time by pondering the sarcastic use of the phrase ‘we lost your Grandma’. We found her 3 hours later shopping for Christmas. Let me make this crystal clear for you in case you’re slow: My Grandmother willingly walked out of the door into a sandstorm, giving up the warmth of a nice sweater and a cup of tea in a weather as inhumanely menayyel as this to get me a Christmas present. Oh would you just fucking kill me now?

El sana deeeh lazem te-fucking-te5las 3la fekra.

They Will Not Listen To You; They Don’t Believe In Souls.

Life Lesson #160: You need to stop stewing in your own juices and start looking for a new pot.

My Fish Died.

You Don’t Counteract A Ruy Lopez With A Lativan Gambit.

Life Lesson #154: Levantine Hummus spiked up with Jerk seasoning is almost like Margaritas, except that they function without the aftermath of a skull-sucking hangover AND they make you feel a hell of a lot warmer. You’d have to temporarily give up on the use of most of your taste buds for the day tho. But hell, who needs that many anyway?

Life Lesson #155: ‘A cup of candles, oh they flicker. Oh they flicker and they float, and I’m up here holding onto all those chandeliers of hope. Like some drunkard Elvis singing, I go singing out of tune. Saying how I always loved you darling, and I always will. Oh when you’re still waiting for the snow to fall, it doesn’t really feel like Christmas at all.'

Life Lesson #156: It’s the little confirmations that there’s one thing you’re doing right, like a cheap-ass pen that epitomises that maths equation that nobody could solve but you. Who woulda thought that a little “Shatra” from your dad and maths teacher could have you regress into your three-year-old self and you end up smiling wide enough to catch flies in your teeth?

Life Lesson #157: Tying a watch to on of your two primary limbs will not help you keep time as much as gluing a compass to your forehead will help you have a better sense of direction. It just makes it the second most obsessed-over abstract principle ever concocted. And no, you don’t want me talking about the first. At least not when I’m experiencing a Levantine high and a Taoist low.

Life Lesson #158: “What do you mean you’re trying?  You don’t try, you do it.” – Dad.

Life Lesson #159: Knight to E4. Bishop to E4. Queen to E4. Pawn to E4. Rook to E8. Checkmate.

When You’re Still Waiting For The Snow To Fall, It Doesn’t Really Feel Like Christmas At All..

December.

I’m not sure I can quite explain it, but I’m glad December’s here. It’s has this air of closure to it, that somehow everything’s gonna be alright after all, and even if it’s not, it will be over nonetheless, which is almost just as soothing. You can see your breath now, and you’re gonna feel like your nose is going to freeze and fall off your face, and that’s the beauty of it. Everything feels like it’s there, in one way or another; whether it’s the breath you see or the glasses that blur in the chilly morning, your fingers that hurt when you press the piano keys because it’s too cold but you press em still, your toes that somehow still manage to freeze inside the socks. It has this austere ‘thereness’ to it, everything somehow waits and time slows down. For once, you know that you’re here now. That it will be over, and that it won’t rush.

Or maybe that just makes sense to me.

It was a long day today. I’ve been working non-stop for almost 10 hours. Work makes you stop thinking, as paradoxical as that may sound. If you do it hard enough, it’ll shush all the voices in your head.

But you might not need to do that if you don’t have voices, that is.

That’s why the voices are essential to a somehow functional life. Just figure out a way to shush the tiny buggers every once in a while. Maybe 7 hours of maths and 3 hours of chemistry aren’t always the recommendable method, but it works you know. You go with what works.

I got a mug today. The Maths teacher had em specially made with mathematical signs jumbled all over them and handed them out to those who aced the supposedly impossible maths evaluation quiz and I got one. That made my day. After a really long day of working at stuff you’re not sure you’re good at or will ever be good at you get this teeny tiny confirmation that maybe there’s one little thing you’re doing right. Numbers always make sense, they look all complicated and jumbled up, but if you know how it’s supposed to look like before you dig in, then it just can’t go wrong. Maths is easier than people. It makes sense, it just adds up. It has patterns and predictable algorithms. You draw on whatever you know and your head does the rest, and most importantly of all, if the equation has no solution, you tend to know it beforehand by checking on a couple of values and replacing figures here and there. That’s not the way with life. You never know how it’s gonna turn out. Or if it will turn out at all. With Maths you tend to know it’s going somewhere even if you’re not really sure where the hell that is, which is comforting, in an odd sort of way. It’s easy, dependable. It’s also ‘there’.

I got this song stuck in my head, which is odd since it’s one of those sappy songs, or rather pussy songs really, that get tossed for some other slightly emotionally-grounded song. Besides the feline-tinged voice and the pathetically patched up lyrics – seriously, ‘let the judges frown’? It actually makes sense, in some I-only-have-a-500-word-stash-of-chick-vocabulary sort of way. Try having “Goodbye My Lover – James Blunt” stuck in your head if you’ve had your brain folds reared to the reverberations of something along the lines of ‘Cemeteries of London’ or ‘Thistles And Weeds’ for over a year. It just doesn’t...sit well, you know? You think Amy Lee is emo? Try this androgyne.

And what’s with the squealing ‘I’m so hollow’ line anyway? TWSS much? Someone shoulda given him a heads up, if you catch my drift. It’s bad enough that he hits notes only canines can pick up, no need to ground the hermaphrodite allegations. Well, that Maroon 5 dude is an epicene too, so I guess that’s, like, the thing nowadays, or whatever.

life Lesson #153: Theocracy happens when Theology sleeps with Democracy. Not a good sight.

E=MC²

So apparently people can get headaches and tummy aches at the same time. It could also coincide with Chemistry dilemmas, accidents poking out on repressed shit and heartaches. So that’s all literal, figurative and metaphorical forms of agony all in the very same time tunnel. You’d think Einstein would come up with an equation for that, but all he came up with is Energy equals mass multiplied by quantum squared. So, if we can consider energy to be the actual agony, mass to be the literal and figurative agonies with quantum symbolizing the all too metaphorical but not any less realistic good ole heartache squared, I’m kinda on the same lane as the homologous psychological outcome of a fucking nuclear explosion, wouldn’t you say?

Whatever.

So Chemistry. The third most bullshit-filled, theoretically-based, illogically rationalizing science after Politics and Theology. How many exceptions can one friggin element have for god’s sake? And why am I required to know that Ionization of Sc +3 requires an exceptionally high amount of quantum to break the relatively stable Sc +2 configuration at this point of my life? There are only so many metaphors one can use to differentiate between Electron Affinity and Ionization energy, which, if I may add, included an explicit hoe metaphor to get it to stick. There I’ve said it. So, lemme put it easy for the kids, Ionization energy is the hoe who pushes everybody away but electron affinity is the one that releases equal amounts of energy in congruence with whatever relationshit she’s going through. Heartaches messing with head much? I knowww. You should see my chemistry book. Gooooooooooootta love metaphors.

I’m whining. I’m off.

Mom’s Birthday :)

Of Cabbies And Capes.

Apart from riding in a cab with a senile citizen who kept asking all the other unsuspecting cab riders what they thought about the elections just so he could say that the government, to him, is just like the French Occupation; “They have to be removed”. My “And where are you gonna put em?” quip was not appreciated. Life Lesson #152: When arguing with old people, it’s highly advisable to go with their version of the plot.

Cab rides are becoming almost the most entertaining faction of my, recently commuting-enhanced, day-to-day life. I gotta say, finding my mom singing the chorus to “a7eb el nas el ray2a” that she’d picked up on our way home from Arabic Class was one hell of a sight. I haven’t laughed that hard since I overheard her singing Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” all the way from the kitchen to the living room.

Did you ever notice that in folkloric Arabic songs, the musical instruments used are almost always of an unidentifiable origin? You can hear the tune, yes, but where is the tune coming from? Think about it, how else could one mix the sound of a stringed instrument with that of a wind instrument? There’s a sound, yes. But what is it?

It was mum’s birthday yesterday. It was nice because I don’t usually get to spend a lot of time with her, so we hung out most of the day, had yoghurt and vanilla ice cream and saw Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. Yes, my mom’s cool enough for a half centenarian to see a cinematic alteration of a children’s book series on her birthday and still have fun, thank you.

On an unrelated note, ever noticed that despite the fact that all movie series, a different composer is almost always hired to transcribe the track but it’s only in the Harry Potter series that the track is different variations of the same idiosyncratic tune even though the composers come and go like pawns?  In the Twilight series, each movie of the three that have been released has had a different musical background, except for Carter Burwell’s Bella’s Lullaby off the first  movie that is somehow now still stuck in everybody’s head as the official soundtrack, even though it’s hardly there in the second and third movie. If my memory has not betrayed me, I don’t think it was there at all. Alexandre Desplat, the composer of the soundtrack of New Moon  and Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Pt.1, changed the entirety of the logo-worth musical body to the former while sticking to the same outlines of John William’s “Hedwig’s Theme” in the latter, which means that there’s a segment in the contract of the Harry Potter movies that states the tune should not be altered over the transcribing process for marketing purposes, thus limiting the composer’s freelancing power over it, quite outrageously to the work of another’s; which is a hard contract term for supposedly renowned composers to agree to unless the production is big enough that they have to overlook it to be a part of the produced body of work. Come to think of it though, it’s only when the music is constant that the fairytale is somehow..tangible, wouldn’t you say? I was thinking it could be a marketing legerdemain to contribute the rooting of the Harry-Potterism in the history of cinema as well as the minds of the beguiled audience as somehow a body of its own. Too many variables to one thing is fidgety whereas unvarying aspect, albeit transfixed, are grounded.

Format Em Neurotransmitters.

Life Lesson #151: ‘The bad news is, your choices and intentions, some people and places, those nights spent awake and all you've done, can lead you to the bottom of the pit. The good news is, this wouldn't be the first time someone's crawled, tooth and nail, out of hell.’ – IWTFY

Thanksgiving.

I was talking with a good friend of mine about what we’re doing for thanksgiving, and she told me she found a slip of paper inside a book she bought  from an old lady at a bazaar where she wrote that everybody should have at least 10 things to be thankful for every thanksgiving, listing hers. Besides how heart-wrenchingly adorable this is, it provides an excellent paradigm shift. People should stop to think about happy stuff more often, even if they’re not real. Oh and by the way, for thanksgiving, I went on a walk with dad till 3 am in the morning. Despite the fact that now almost a mile away people thought we were drunk and I was his girlfriend, nobody manages to laugh that hard and talk non-stop for three hours over a can of birrell and a sandwich of ta3meya except dad and I. :) I had the Birrell, he had the ta3meya, nuff said.

Here goes..

• My Dad. A couple of days ago, 5 am, neither of us could sleep and were just splayed there on the couch with the lights off watching some gory movie where a dude rushed into a room and kept punching someone’s face off saying “AND I LOVED YOU THE MOOOST!” then dad says, out of the blue, “..Remind me to kill you”.

• My Mug of Coffee that’s always there when I need it.

• People who stay alive.

• People who stay.

• Time.

• Derelict Pianos in old school buildings.

• My cathartic Jogging route.

• That Danny Elfmann, Dreaming, Coldplay, Maths and Rubik’s Cubes exist, in the same world that I do.

• Cussing. :)

• Selective memory.

Oh, and as a good friend suggested:

• “You could add annoying the fuck out of people with stupid music on my blog”.

I Really Fucked It Up This Time, Didn’t I My Dear?

It’s Getting Hard To Hide Em Sniffles.

In the Penn and Teller Bullshit show, if the fat guy is the one who does all the talking, then what’s the use of the shorter creep? They were trying to save money on props?

There’s not much going on really, I’m stuck with major exams all week long, fell out with a good friend, caught a cold in the process and am currently alternating Penn and Teller Bullshit show on Recycling myths with Barney Stinson’s CBS blog.

   Not my idea of a balanced equation.

I should start on the shitload of chemistry I have to get down before 8 pm, but in a bit. By all means, you gotta tickle the humour bone every now and then especially when you’re feeling so down in the gutters that you could supply for your own recycling mission, so it’s a good balance. I was gonna try and  slip in a couple of comics too, but there’s only so much you can do with a limited DSL connection. You thought I was gonna say head, didn’t you?

I’m trying to hide the cold from my mom, till after Thursday or Friday, so that I’m not on house arrest by then and manage to snatch a few outings before resuming the force-feeding of science, and in this case, antibiotics. That BBC spray thingie is evil. It’s designed by a dimwit who wanted to paralyse they’re smart mouth of an opponent’s speech abilities long enough to try and think of a decent comeback. I’ll quote a good friend who said what all of y’all are probably thinking by now: “You’re not supposed to spray it on your tongue, doofus! you put it way back in your throat. TWSS.” Still tho, that thing always makes its way down the road and I end up making sure that I didn’t swallow my tongue by mistake every couple of minutes for the next half hour. How else am I supposed to know that my tongue is still in my buccal cavity and not way back down the oesophagus if I can’t FRIGGIN FEEL ITS EXISTENCE ANYMORE!